


Iterations

by Azzandra



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Backstory, Family, Gen, Parenthood, not a very happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 08:33:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11756025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: To the question of when exactly Lotor was born, the answer this fic provides is: several times, actually.





	Iterations

"There's nothing happier than the birth of a child," some nurse would declare as she handed the tiny babe to Honerva.

Ragged with fatigue, Honerva managed a polite smile in response to the truism. She tucked the small thing against her chest, and looked into his scrunched, pink face, still so new to the world. 

They'd decided on a name before he was born; Lotor. Such a clean fold of syllables for such a wrinkled little creature, dragged into this universe so abruptly. He would have to grow into it.

Honerva stared at the babe for a long time. He had, already, the beginnings of short white hair, and when his eyes opened, they were a gentle blue. Two recessive traits that often went together in Alteans. She considered the biology at play with a fascination that exceeded even maternal pride.

The only interruption coming when Zarkon arrived to the room. He was anxious as only a husband could be, and twice over worried, as only a new father could manage. 

But when Zarkon's hand reverently touched the wisps of white hair on Lotor's head, he could only feel bewilderment that such a small thing could make so much love rise in one's chest, that there did not seem enough room to fit it all. He looked at Honerva, still tired from the demands of labor, her hair falling in waves around her, and he could not think of a thing he wanted more in the universe than to be there, with the both of them.

And Honerva smiled, still holding the babe. If her thoughts were of how soon she could recuperate and return to the lab, that was neither here nor there. Eventually, she would not even remember it. And in the long run, she would discover for herself how easy Lotor was to love. 

 

* * *

 

Lotor would grow lean, not as tall as a Galra, and not the least bit stymied by the fact. He would be smart, but not interested in intellectual pursuits, and charismatic, but not inclined towards leadership. He would exasperate all his tutors, and dally with every individual who so much as caught his eye.

As an heir, that was an unfortunate combination of traits, but if he escaped any criticism of it from his parents, then the reason was how much of their thoughts were consumed by quintessence. As Lotor grew, it seemed to him that he could bend anyone to his charms like flowers turning towards the sun.

 

* * *

 

"Mother, what will you do when you finish your research?" he asked.

"Finish?" she echoed, eyes not leaving the screen. "If I had ten lifetimes, I still couldn't explore all the possibilities that the quintessence presents us with."

The cat perched on her desk flicked the tip of its tail, and blinked slowly at Lotor. 

"But if you _had_ to stop," Lotor continued.

Honerva paused from her typing, turning to glance at Lotor.

He had grown taller than she seemed to remember. Had she not seen him for that long? It didn't seem possible. 

She took his face into her hands; he was taller than her now. When had that happened? When? His hair fell like a white curtain around his shoulders, that part hadn't changed about him at all. His expression was drawn, some odd tension behind his eyes.

"I wouldn't trade this life for anything," she said, and she truly believed it.

Lotor's expression grew dark, turbulent. He brushed her hands away.

"That's what I was afraid you'd say," he spat, and stormed off.

Honerva remained rooted in place, uncertain. She felt she had made a mistake, but could not pinpoint what it was.

She returned her attention to the research, and banished any such thoughts.

 

* * *

 

Quintessence changed everything, overturned the rules, and presented Honerva with the challenge of finding different constants to the universe. This was good; she would not be complacent.

If death was not as binding as they had assumed, that was merely a readjustment she had to make in her calculations.

But once it happened, once death came and went and washed through them, banished by the light of quintessence, Honerva's head did not seem to be able to hold calculations in the same way. Her hands could hold the light, but the numbers slipped through her fingers. changed in strange ways.

Did it hurt? Did this hurt? She couldn't tell. Why couldn't she tell?

 

* * *

 

Eventually, inevitably, someone would come to say, 'Prince Lotor is dead.'

Adjustments; calculations.

"Another Altean stain erased from the universe," one advisor spat to another, trading poison in darkened corners, passing dark glances behind her back--unspoken was 'when will _she_ be next?'.

They forgot themselves; they forgot who had Zarkon's ear. When she told Zarkon how they spoke of his son, they would learn. They would learn what love twisted to, after its object was dead. _There's nothing happier than the birth of a child._ There's nothing worse than--

_This_ hurt.

 

* * *

 

It was decades down the road, maybe centuries, of the universe being nothing but fodder for the Galra war machine. The faces around them changed, aged, disappeared; advisors replaced with generals. Still Honerva at Zarkon's side, always her. Each other's constants. Long dead, still alive.

The lab was gone, but there was no need for containment, when the quintessence was already inside them. What mattered was the forever roiling war machine, ever-expanding spheres of influence sustained by ever-changing machines of war, fueled by quintessence.

Oh, how they hated her. How they hated Zarkon's Altean witch. But they couldn't do without her. The quintessence made them conquerors, but it was the witch who knew how to mold it into the unassailable advantage it was.

They began calling her, in spite, Haggar, like the old witch from Galra stories, who'd lost her beauty and grown bitter. They meant it as an insult, but she assumed the name herself. Another few generations to slip by, and the universe would forget the petty gossips who used the name against her. But Haggar would linger in Zarkon's shadow still, long past anyone else. And perhaps she, too, would forget she'd once had any other name. But that mattered very little to her anymore.

 

* * *

 

Shadows tended to catch the whispers, and Haggar knew how to listen. She took note of any hint of dissatisfaction. She knew how doubt could rot into treason in the minds of the weak. She learned how to tug a single thread and unravel an entire conspiracy.

And she learned that she could not track down every traitor herself; that sometimes betrayal was sunk too deeply and guarded too closely to be identified. So she also learned, in the end, to cut them off at the path.

"An heir," she suggested after a failed assassination attempt which had come entirely too close. 

Zarkon sat on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, head hanging low, but he looked up at Haggar's words. A thin web of scars was already disappearing from the side of his face, fading into nothingness with every drop of quintessence his body absorbed.

"They believe if you are gone, they can partition the Empire among themselves," Haggar continued. "An heir would provide a disincentive."

"And a second target," Zarkon said, almost too neutrally. 

His anger had been spent on the traitors, in a burst of violence and rage which had flared too suddenly and disappeared too soon. His punishment had been justified, but excessive in its cruelty. He was not yet a man used to opposition from his own people. The visionless weaklings they conquered, yes, there would always be those among them who would try to resist their betters. But to have Galra raise their hand against their own emperor was unforgivable. 

Zarkon extended his hand, and Haggar took two steps forward, reached out to place her own palm into his. They both realized, at the same time, that this was the most contact they'd had in years, and Haggar pulled her hand back by some impulse she couldn't fully understand. This man had held her in his arms, and somewhere deep in the past, there was a memory of his hands on her skin. But the quintessence had scoured many things away that had once been familiar. Now the thought only made Haggar feel far away, and foreign from her own body.

Zarkon accepted Haggar's retreat without comment, and let his hand drop. He hummed in his throat, looking towards the floor.

"I would have thought we were creatures beyond the need for heirs now," he said. "And beyond the possibility."

"The need, perhaps not. An heir would provide a certain sense of stability. Of... dynasty. The fools around you would think it meant you intend to step down from the throne one day, and be comforted by the thought. As for the possibility..."

Zarkon looked at her again, eyes narrowed, waiting for Haggar to continue.

For pragmatic reasons, Haggar had considered natural conception. She had even performed tests beforehand, on herself, trying to ascertain if her body had retained anything resembling fertility. 

When she discovered the answer, she had not been certain what she felt about it, if she felt anything at all. It had been a confirmation of a suspicion she'd already had. Dead things did not propagate. 

"There is a way," Haggar said, after a too long pause, "if you would agree to it."

Zarkon stared for a beat. Something passed behind his eyes, some echo of a man he used to be, some dead longing, briefly revived and gone again.

"It would have to be a child of my blood," he said.

"Yes," Haggar said. "Lotor."

The flash in Zarkon's eyes, this time, was not mere echo.

 

* * *

 

When Lotor had been born, Haggar explained, she had had his genetic profile carefully recorded, filed and stored. This was for practical reasons. New organs and new blood could be grown in case of medical emergency, and given that Lotor was a halfbreed, it would have been more expedient than finding a donor who might or might not exist.

In the centuries past, however, there had been an entire glut of medical advances, courtesy of quintessence. Not merely life-extending treatments, which were in vogue among the Galra generals now, but also, as a consequence of the infertility the quintessence caused in them, new ways of producing children.

The heir Haggar so dispassionately proposed was Lotor, born anew.

Zarkon was silent as he stared at Haggar. He said nothing for a very long time, in a way that made Haggar suspect that, if there's been anything left to break in the man, this was when it would have broken.

Instead, he opened his mouth, and his lips moved soundlessly for a moment before the words caught up.

"Do it."

 

* * *

 

If there's been anything left in Haggar to break, it would have broken the first time she held Lotor again.

He was such a small, wrinkled thing, pulled back into this universe anew, to live and suffer as all living things did.

Haggar looked down upon him, and she could not think of what she wished for this child. Like his parents, Lotor's time had come and gone. He had died, and yet he was here.

When she presented the babe to Zarkon, he reached to touch the wisps of white hair, gentler than he'd gone about anything in centuries.

And Haggar had a thought that perhaps they all deserved each other. That perhaps they were the only people in the universe who could be each other's family.

 

* * *

 

Lotor's presence had the expected quelling effect on certain elements of Zarkon's court. Their conniving took a different slant with an heir in play. Did this mean Zarkon planned to step down, they wondered? Did this mean Zarkon wished to start a dynasty? Plans were made and discarded, calculations were changed to take Lotor into account.

With an heir in play, removing Zarkon became less viable as a solution towards bringing down the Galra Empire. The rebels were more profoundly dismayed than the court.

And Lotor, still a child and with the guile that only innocence could muster, threw ever more hitches into plans, as he charmed his way into more hearts than expected. They did not realize how easy he would be to love.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Lotor liked to trace the markings down Haggar's face. 

"Will I get markings too when I'm older?" he asked. His fingers were tiny and sticky, and his eyes were wide and earnest.

"No," Haggar said.

Lotor's lips pursed into a pout.

"Did you have them when you were small like me?" he asked.

Haggar paused for a long time, and she pieced the answer together intellectually more than she recalled it. She could not recall her face so long ago.

"No," she said. "I did not."

Lotor grinned smugly.

"Then you don't know, I could still get them!" he declared, victorious.

Haggar did not argue, but she wondered if it was pain she felt in that moment; some ache she failed to recognize. It passed quickly, like Lotor's life would.

"You have training," Haggar said. She picked Lotor up from her desk, where he'd clambered to get her attention. 

She would have handed him off to one of the guards, to take to the training room, but the boy who had even managed to charm his way past her druids would make short work of the guard.

Haggar caught glimpse of brown robes in the corner of her eye, the apologetic flutter of a druid. Mute and empty of excess feeling, they had still fallen prey to the softer emotions that Lotor induced.

"Will you stay and watch?" Lotor asked, his sticky hand firmly grasping Haggar's gnarled fingers as if they were anything that could bring comfort to a child.

"Your father will check your progress soon," she said instead. Her presence would not make much difference to Lotor's training, but it _was_ required by the experiments waiting for her in her laboratory. 

Lotor seemed momentarily buoyed by the promise of his father's presence, but this immediately crumpled into suspicion.

"Aren't _you_ going to stay?" he asked again.

Haggar looked down again, wanting to be firm. She had to return to her work. A boy's flailing with swords did not take priority over that.

"Not for too long," she found herself saying instead.

A grin broke across Lotor's face regardless, like a shining sunrise on Daibazaal.

She should not have acquiesced so easily, and it would not be long before she would stop being allowing herself to be bent to Lotor's desires, but in that moment, she did not grieve for it overly much.

 

* * *

 

Lotor grew up lean and handsome and with a smile like a poisoned blade. He struck a strange image among the Galra; too delicate by half. But he never let any of them think he was weak, unless it was to their own undoing.

If his parents did not give him the attention he craved, then he grew up to find it elsewhere. He soaked the cheers in the gladiatorial arena; he went through lovers with complete disregard for marriage or alliance.

And he began arguing with his father at the most inopportune times. In public.

"Father," Lotor would begin, striding alongside him as the generals dared only to trail behind, "these situations that allow rebellion to foster could easily be prevented."

Zarkon did not react outwardly. He kept his stride long, and forceful, but Lotor did not fall behind even with his much shorter legs. As had always been the case growing up, he compensated for physical disadvantage with sheer stubbornness.

"You want us to coddle rebels?" one of the generals scoffed from behind. They'd all heard Lotor's arguments before, and even if they were personally persuaded, they did not think to express support unless Zarkon would as well.

And Zarkon's expression was stony; unmoved.

"So much resources are spent to address rebel threats as they rise," Lotor continued, "when a fraction could be spent to prevent them. Wouldn't that be a wiser course of action? For the sake of the Empire?"

Zarkon stopped then; so abruptly that some of his generals ran into each others' back, and there was scuffling as they recovered their composure.

"Make no mistake, Lotor," the emperor spoke, an edge of danger to his voice, "when the Empire is complete, there will be peace for all of its subjects. But until then, there will be no room for weakness. They will submit, or they will be crushed."

Zarkon did not exactly soften next, but he was not unkind as he placed a hand on Lotor's shoulder.

"You have become confident in your capability," he said, "but you still have much to learn. I see now that you require more... responsibilities. Very well. You shall have them."

That had not been what Lotor had been angling for, and he was taken aback to be offered such. He knew this was a distraction, some way for Zarkon to throw Lotor off his goal, but to be offered such an honor by the Emperor was something even his own heir could not refuse.

"Thank you, Father," Lotor said as graciously as he could manage, and as Zarkon nodded, Lotor knew he'd been dismissed.

As Zarkon departed, his trail of generals following in his wake, only Lotor remained in the corridor, and Zarkon's lingering shadow watching from a corner.

Haggar walked over to Lotor, as he watched his father go. She stood quiet for a time, waiting for him to speak first, but he did not for a long time.

Finally, Lotor turned to look at her, and his expression was dark, and turbulent.

"He means to send me away, like a toddler who wants to play at an inconvenience time," Lotor accused.

Haggar did not rise to the bait. She'd learned that sometimes Lotor used self-pity like a lash against others. He'd done it in his previous adolescence as well. 

"He will give you a task to accomplish," Haggar said, "and if you do it well enough, you will earn his generals' respect."

"But not Father's respect?" Lotor's eyes narrowed.

"He loves you," she said, which wasn't the same as respect, and perhaps not even entirely true. 

Lotor himself seemed surprised by the notion. They had never shown it in the same way as other parents. Haggar could not even remember how parents were meant to do that, if she'd done it at all. She was past learning at this point anyway.

"But that's not enough to have him listen to me," Lotor said, and turned away.

 

* * *

 

Zarkon's task sent Lotor to the edges of the Empire, where the conflict was fiercest, and the new conquests were at their most defiant. He was thrust into governing a den of rebels, and in snide asides, the generals told each other that this would teach the young sprout how the universe really worked.

For a time, the reports came as expected. The daily scuffles with the peacekeeping forces, the riots, the sabotage.

Then, all the rest.

First came the rumors that Lotor fought at the front lines, alongside his enlisted men, and for a while this merely provided piquant gossip for the generals to swap around. 

But then the other things, the altogether stranger reports of how Lotor chose to govern. The pardons given to locals who had once taken arms against he Galra, the amnesty, even rewards, given to rebels who would turn against their own. The unusually gentle hand with which he ruled.

More vexing to all involved was that it worked. The planet's resources were being extracted and sent to the Galra Empire on time, with rebel sabotage so minimal that shipments no longer suffered any notable delays.

Left to his own devices, Lotor got... results. And as more time passed, the harder it became to ignore.

Even Zarkon was just about nearly impressed. Haggar could see it in him, the way his head tilted attentively each time a new report about Lotor was brought in. 

He had Haggar line up a new task for Lotor, a greater challenge for the young prince to rise up to.

And the very night before he summoned Lotor back to his throne, the news came.

Lotor had been caught in a last desperate rebel attack, and killed. There would be no body returned, for it had been reduced to ashes in a ship engine explosion.

Haggar brought the news to Zarkon herself; there was nobody she was willing to entrust this to. When her gaze met Zarkon's, she was aware of the terrible truth they both experienced.

This hurt just as badly the second time.

Worse would be when they discovered: this was how it would hurt _every_ time.

 

* * *

 

It was never out of attachment that they brought Lotor back. Haggar had considered the matter carefully, in the intervening years, whenever her thoughts drifted through this strange tract of her mind that Lotor haunted.

It was ultimately a pragmatic decision, each and every single time. When properly reined to a task, Lotor was an asset to the Empire. He had a cunning which Zarkon appreciated, and he always managed to win over the Galra, in one way or another.

He was also a boy with his own notions. Sometimes those notions changed, from one lifetime to another, depending on what state the empire found itself in. Haggar wondered how much influence she or Zarkon had upon Lotor, how much they could change the strange tracks or Lotor's ambitions.

She wondered, in those same intervening years between all of Lotor's different iterations, what she would do differently; what she would encourage Zarkon to do differently as well. What effect would there be if she said this, or did that, or treated him in a certain way.

But then Lotor was there once again, and paradoxically Haggar did not give him as much thought when she knew he was within reach.

He grew, each time, lean and smiling and a part of him always wild inside, beyond the control of his parents or the expectations of the Empire. He found different ways to bend people to him: a smile, a flair in combat, a friendly hand or a smoldering gaze, and they would turn to him, like flowers to the sun. His preferred tool differed, from one lifetime to the next, but he always found a way.

And each lifetime, he found a new way to exasperate Zarkon: some new political notion, some radical interest in some modern piece of technology or branch of science, an interest in art once that ended with him becoming the foppish patron to a pack of degenerate subversives--Zarkon was especially displeased with that course of events. 

But beyond all of it, Lotor would live, and he would commit himself to the Empire in new, idealistic ways, and even as strange as his methods could be at times, the Empire was, more often than not, stronger for Lotor's actions.

And Lotor would die. He would die in blazes of glory, or in quiet assassination. Old age, fewer times than Haggar would have hoped, and in exile, more times than she would have wanted. All his funerals were quiet affairs; when Lotor died, nobody dared say his name in louder than a whisper, for fear that Zarkon would hear, and for fear of what Zarkon would do when he heard.

But whenever Lotor was brought up again, in swallowed syllables and meaningful silence, there would always be a reaction. There would always be, if not a sneer and glad riddance of him, then a gentle tap against the chest; a softly spoken Vrepit Sa, for the prince who would never be heir.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Thanks for getting to the end. This is the first Voltron fic I've written, so I hope I didn't mess us anything too badly. I also hope you enjoyed the fic.
> 
> A lot of people are consumed by the question of when Lotor was conceived and born. And so am I! This fic was my attempt to come up with an answer that doesn't contradict what we already know too badly. 
> 
> I don't really think this is where canon will be headed, and I expect this fic will be jossed by October, so if you're wondering why I'd write a fic just to have it become non-canon-compliant in a few months, I... have no justifications, tbh. As I was trying to fall asleep one night, still mulling on the question of Lotor's conception, my brain hit me with 'Lotor has a Duncan Idaho thing going on' and I was like 'WTF, brain, that's amazing... I have to write a fic about this premise now'. 
> 
> (Also originally the fic was supposed to be more about Lotor, but as I wrote the focus just turned to Haggar. Oops...? I felt like focusing on Lotor's many lives and the shenanigans therein would have had more comedic potential, but that was at odds with the tone of this fic. Maybe another time.)
> 
> It also came in the wake of some speculations I've made about [Lotor's motives](http://azzandra.tumblr.com/post/163820903571/okay-so-serious-considerations-about-lotors), which I stand by, and which made me want to explore the familial relationships a bit more.
> 
> Enjoyed this story? Consider [buying me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/A86637AZ).


End file.
